1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to a hierarchical classifier to detect trends in a temporally ordered set of cases, and more particularly to the continuous, complete, automated monitoring of changes in frequencies of hierarchical topics of cases including, for example, medical cases of patient problems or business-related case of customer service requests.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Technology exists that can be used to automatically categorize items such as documents into a hierarchy of possible categories or topics. Some such existing technology is based on the manual authoring of rules, e.g., “if the document contains the word [database] then put it in the category ‘databases’”. Alternatively, fully automated methods to do such categorization exist, for example, based on level-by-level Bayesian categorization, or based on C4.5. It is believed that applications to automatically aggregate and analyze the results of such categorization over multiple sets of items or over multiple time windows are not presently known. The current state of the art is that such analysis would have to be done manually, for example by a business analyst into reports.
The closest known prior art applies a hierarchical classifier to documents recently accessed to determine which support documents are most used by customers. This tool considers only the distribution within a single (the recent) time window. This information can then also be used as a proxy to detect which topics are most frequently the cause of customer problems.
How things are distributed, for example, trends up or down for anything, can provide very useful and important information if the information can be assembled, handled, classified and analyzed properly.